By
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON - A former high-ranking official in Iraq's nuclear weapons program says he got American help in designing a bomb for Saddam Hussein: library copies of reports on the 1940s Manhattan Project.
"I found a nice gift from the U.S. Atomic Energy Project at the library - the Manhattan Project report," Khidhir Hamza, a nuclear physicist who defected in 1994, said yesterday in a rare public appearance.
One of only three or four nuclear physicists in Iraq when the bomb project began in the 1970s, he says he found the reports at Iraq's atomic energy library "in a corner with a pile of dust on them ..., sitting there telling me exactly what to do."
The Manhattan Project was the crash U.S. government program in which scientists developed the atomic bomb and produced the two that were dropped on the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II.
In a speech at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Hamza did not say how the Iraqi library got the reports, which like much other information are readily available around the world now.
He has said previously, however, that Iraq had a program before the 1991 Persian Gulf War of searching open literature and getting close to people in the United States who had classified information. Specifically, Iraqi students in the United States combed university libraries for bomb-building information, and Iraqi agents and scientists collected data at American scientific conferences and elsewhere, he has said.
Hamza, who co-authored the just-released book "Saddam's Bombmaker," said Iraqi scientists and engineers concealed their work from international inspectors by simply locking doors and leading inspectors past them.
"We understood what the inspector's limits were. He was not allowed to ask outside certain limits," Hamza told a conference on nuclear proliferation at the Carnegie think tank. "So he would be taken to a set path, and he would be answered within the limits of what he was allowed to ask, and he would leave. And next door is where we would be working on whatever we were doing to enrich uranium or design a bomb."
Hamza said he believes Iraq could build a nuclear weapon "within months" if it got fissionable material from Russia or on the black market. Without that, he said, it would need to rebuild destroyed factories to produce its own material, which would require two or three years.
After his defection, Hamza worked for a time at the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington research group, and as a consultant to the Energy Department.
The assessment of how long Iraq would need to reconstitute the nuclear weapons program destroyed by the Gulf War and the following U.N. inspections, comes from work he did with the institute.
